Ikaalisten Scania Ajokki

Copenhagen of course is not a bad place to see coaches from all over Scandinavia including Finland which tend to be rather more elusive further down in Europe compared with let's say Sweden. They often carried very different coachwork too like this rather boxy unusual looking Scania bodied by Ajokki and belonging to Ikaalisten Auto Oy seen in sunny 1982

1983: a very good year

Even though sadly new AEC buses had not been available since the Seventies when British Leyland did away with them, East Kent had ten ten-year-old Reliance coaches rebodied by Berkhof in 1983-4. Originally carrying the Registration HFN 28L No. 8197 bore a Duple Dominant coach body whilst parked next to it and much closer to home from Combe Martin when seen in Plymouth was Loverings A207 JTT a Plaxton Paramount 3200 bodied Leyland Tiger also of that 1983 vintage.

Southdown Coaches: Before Shearings was King of the Road:

Southdown was always associated with Leyland coaches and that tradition continued through the NBC era. At fist they were painted in that all-inclusive boring white but as time went on more local colours were added to the various operator's improving the image considerably. Even as this spotless Plaxton 3500 bodied Leyland Tiger shows this much esteemed fine Sussex operator was still something to be reckoned with. However who would have thought that Shearings Pleasureways whose fleet included slow noisy lightweight tin-can R1114-5 Fords really would one day actually be what seemed like a joke calling themselves 'Kings of the Road'. But that has come to pass for they are now by far the driving force in what's left of the UK coach tour industry even through a formality swallowing up the likes of Wallace Arnold. I first thought this was a Ford too but as TND 431X was a Volvo B10M with similar Plaxton Supreme bodywork I guess this one No.429 might well be the same. The shot was taken in the mid-Eightes on the M1 Motorway probably at Toddington Service Area.

Bern Trams

An old Bern tram meets a modern suburban light-rail car just outside the city in the early Nineties. I read as modernisation continues here in the Swiss Capital there are plans afoot to bring this other operator's cars right into the old city.

BUF in Scarborough

Probably after London types most enthusiasts favourite double-decker might be one of these. The well known Lincolnshire Independent Appleby ran this well travelled Southdown Leyland PD3 Queen Mary open-top bus on the sea front service at Scarborough when I visited there at the end of the Eighties and compared to the other more recent rear-engined buses working this highly competitive run was certainly the star turn. After Appleby's this fine bus went on to serve with Wallace Arnold as a publicity bus but saw some open-top service work in Torquay with them too.

Vandereyke of Belgium

Naturally Copenhagen is a magnet for touring coaches from abroad and in 1982 outside the railway station I spotted this fine LAG Panoramic bodied turbo powered Volvo belonging to an operator from Belgium.

M & D: Autumn in Tunbridge Wells

It was a dull and dank late-autumn afternoon too back in the Eighties when I last visited the smart Kent town. As you can see there were still a few old Leyland Leopards of Maistone and District running about including Marshall bodied 3459 on the 231 to Edenbridge.

No it's not Lisbon or Reading it's Porto

These blue and orange AEC's in Lisbon or Porto remind me of another keen operator of that make called Smiths of Reading which operated about eighty-eight vehicles. However private firms with more than fifty vehicles were nationalised as part of Portugal's orange and cream RN fleet, but there were plenty of small ones left to add to the variety when I visited there in the Eighties. RN buses were even more common in the South such as here at Faro.

Volvos in Lisbon

The one nearest the camera has a body by Salvador Caetano whose livery seems to echo the heavy sandstone brown of the imposing buildings and the whiteness and chrome plate of other traffic.

Warstone Green Bus: Leyland Olympian Single-Decker

Warstone of Great Wyrley ran many interesting buses including this MCW bodied chassisless Leyland Olympian single-decker. In the early days their smart traditional looking dark green buses visited Stafford on Market Days taking the back road service to Penkridge along country lanes taking in the village of Acton Trussell which used to be served by double-deckers on a local service 873 by Midland Red in the old BMMO days. This bus No.14 arrived in 1975 soon after Warstone's started running buses and came via Haydern of Chirk.

A VBK 50 Volvo at Lyngby

One of the nice things about exploring Copenhagen's larger suburbs like Lyngby was not only seeing the number of former Independents buses still wearing their original colours but in the process the Danish capital's operator HT had acquired some interesting buses too. These included a pair of Volvo B10M-60 buses with VBK 50 bodies dating from 1980. This pair Nos.6006-7 became part of HT in 1982 when Hjortekaer Trafik was taken over but when I was there again at the end of the Eighties little had changed and they were still wearing that smart dark green and working their original routes like the 185 to Holte and Bakkefaldet.

It was about 1980 and too foggy to cast a Stone in Stone

Well it was not that bad but we used to get a lot more fog than today in the Seventies. Think of Bassetts of Tittensor and one thinks of maybe Fodens the Bristol LH or the Leyland Tiger and Leopard coaches or even Bedfords. But perhaps their best known coach was this odd man out being an AEC Regal that was very similar to the London Transport RF buses being built in the early Fifties. Painted on the front of it's well rounded Plaxton bodywork was the legend 'Speedy' which suggest this AEC's heavyweight equivalent to Leyland's Royal Tiger was also something of a flyer. It was pictured in Stone just north of Stafford on a cold foggy winter's day with another fine AEC this time an Alexander Y-type bodied Reliance of Potteries creeping past in the morning rush-hour. Fortunately both RMB 240 and DVT 167J have become preservation candidates with the Regal being in the care of the museum at Wythall near Redditch.